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Morning Scan: Lending Club Twist; Post-Crisis Blame Game

06/08/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Treading Water: Renaud Laplanche, co-founder and former chief executive of Lending Club, is rumored to be in talks with banks and private equity firms regarding financing a buyout of the online lender. After his ousting in May, Laplanche had engaged the firms in preliminary talks about acquiring and taking Lending Club private, though they may not lead to a deal. Meanwhile, Lending Club has postponed its annual meeting to June 28 because...

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Morning Scan: Undoing Dodd Frank; Wells Fargo Makes Plans

06/07/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Dodd-Frank Replacement Plan: House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling has a plan to revamp the Dodd-Frank Act and replace it with a capital-based alternative, which banks could opt into if they meet certain requirements, like a 10% leverage ratio (U.S. banks are currently required to meet a leverage ratio of 6%). "Think of it as a market-based, equity-financed Dodd-Frank off ramp," that will "relieve financial institutions from regulations that create more...

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Morning Scan: Junior Banker Focus; Fintech Regulation Vacuum

06/06/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Juniorization: While investment banks have cut compensation costs by 21% on average since 2009, they've only made staff cuts of 3% in the same time. Companies have been increasing their employee retention efforts initiative to improve the work-life balance of its more junior bankers. Once able to attract young talent with a large salary alone, banks must compete with the technology industry and other areas of finance that offer young workers competitive...

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Morning Scan: Overheated Auto Lending Sector Worries Dimon; Tougher Stress Tests Coming

06/03/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Auto Loans in the Spotlight: All of those TV and radio advertisements from car dealerships could be coming back to bite the banks making loans for new cars. Speaking about the overheated market for auto lending, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said "someone is going to get hurt." Not JPMorgan, of course. "It won't be us," Dimon said. Probably community banks. ...

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Women in Banking: How Arbitration Hurts Women; Is the CFO Role 'Women's' Work?

06/02/16

Mandatory arbitration policies are gaining attention as one of the hurdles to gender parity in the financial services industry. Catherine Flax of BNP Paribas is part of a vanguard of female foreign currency traders on Wall Street, though they still stand out in the "bros' club." Is the CFO role the new 'women's' job? Also, Ally's Carrie Sumlin and Wells Fargo's Secil Watson are recognized as Digital Bankers of the Year.

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Morning Scan: Mortgage Laws Put Lenders in a Bind; Rappers' Fraud Confession

06/02/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

State of Banking, Continued: The regulatory push for banks to take fewer risks in mortgage lending has also meant that banks are issuing fewer mortgages to African-Americans and Hispanics. As part of the new regulatory scheme, banks have moved into making high-dollar mortgages because they carry less risk, the Wall Street Journal reports in its ongoing series on the state of banking. In the process, low-income and middle-income consumers are finding it...

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Morning Scan: Community Banks Enjoy Rebound; Tarullo's Influence

06/01/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Return to Form?: Community banks are doing very well, thank you very much, Mr. Dimon. But it's not necessarily a return to the salad days of pre-2008. The Wall Street Journal's ongoing series on the banking industry looks at the state of community banking, and pronounces the sector healthy, but facing serious issues. Â...

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Morning Scan: Broad Questions About Banking's Future Amid Pressures

05/31/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Banking's Identity Crisis: Banks are in the midst of a period of upheaval, as the industry seeks to reinvent itself amid huge changes in consumer preferences, banking technology and the regulatory landscape. Fintech disruptors will probably be subsumed into the larger banking universe, although their ideas will live in. Ultimately, the old ways of banking will die only when those banks that lived through the financial crisis move on. ...

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Morning Scan: Payments Without Borders; Cyber Hack Attacks

05/27/16

Receiving Wide Coverage…

Not Without a Trace: Security researchers have found evidence linking North Korea to three recent attacks on Asian banks — in the Philippines in October, Vietnam in December and the $81 million theft from the central bank of Bangladesh in February. They said in each event the attackers used a piece of rare but identical code seen in just two cases before: the Sony hack in 2014 and one on South Korea banks...

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Women in Banking: 'Boom-Boom Room' Milestone; Contrarian Branch Strategy

05/26/16

Sexism is less blatant than in the "Boom-Boom Room" era, but women aren't yet treated like equals at the male-dominated Wall Street firms. A community bank CEO takes a contrarian approach to underperforming branches, staffing up instead of closing them down, and Bank of the West embeds star employees at nonprofits as leadership training. Also, FinCEN's Jennifer Shasky Calvery in her final congressional hearing, a swipe at Brexit sexism, and is the fact that uniforms are going out of fashion a good thing for gender equality?

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